Use the labels in the right column to find what you want. Or you can go thru them one by one, there are only 15849 posts. Searching is done in the search box in upper left corner. I blog on anything to do with stroke.DO NOT DO ANYTHING SUGGESTED HERE AS I AM NOT MEDICALLY TRAINED, YOUR DOCTOR IS, LISTEN TO THEM. BUT I BET THEY DON'T KNOW HOW TO GET YOU 100% RECOVERED. I DON'T EITHER, BUT HAVE PLENTY OF QUESTIONS FOR YOUR DOCTOR TO ANSWER.

Deans' stroke musings

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain!Just think of all thetrillions and trillions of neuronsthatDIEeach daybecause there areNOeffective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 493 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.My back ground story is here:http://oc1dean.blogspot.com/2010/11/my-background-story_8.html

Monday, January 15, 2018

Monthly cycles of brain activity linked to seizures in patients with epilepsy

UC San Francisco neurologists have discovered monthly cycles of brain activity linked to seizures in patients with epilepsy. The finding, published online January 8 in Nature Communications, suggests it may soon be possible for clinicians to identify when patients are at highest risk for seizures, allowing patients to plan around these brief but potentially dangerous events.
"One of the most disabling aspects of having epilepsy is the seeming randomness of seizures," said study senior author Vikram Rao, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of neurology at UCSF and member of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences. "If your neurologist can't tell you if your next seizure is a minute from now or a year from now, you live your life in a state of constant uncertainty, like walking on eggshells. The exciting thing here is that we may soon be able to empower patients by letting them know when they are at high risk and when they can worry less."
Epilepsy is a chronic disease characterized by recurrent seizures -- brief storms of electrical activity in the brain that can cause convulsions, hallucinations, or loss of consciousness. Epilepsy researchers around the world have been working for decades to identify patterns of electrical activity in the brain that signal an oncoming seizure, but with limited success. In part, Rao says, this is because technology has limited the field to recording brain activity for days to weeks at most, and in artificial inpatient settings.
At UCSF Rao has pioneered the use of an implanted brain stimulation device that can quickly halt seizures by precisely stimulating a patient's brain as a seizure begins. This device, called the NeuroPace RNS® System, has also made it possible for Rao's team to record seizure-related brain activity for many months or even years in patients as they go about their normal lives. Using this data, the researchers have begun to show that seizures are less random than they appear. They have identified patterns of electrical discharges in the brain that they term "brain irritability" that are associated with higher likelihood of having a seizure.

The new study, based on recordings from the brains of 37 patients fitted with NeuroPace implants, confirmed previous clinical and research observations of daily cycles in patients' seizure risk, explaining why many patients tend to experience seizures at the same time of day. But the study also revealed that brain irritability rises and falls in much longer cycles lasting weeks or even months, and that seizures are more likely to occur during the rising phase of these longer cycles, just before the peak. The lengths of these long cycles differ from person to person but are highly stable over many years in individual patients, the researchers found.
The researchers show in the paper that when the highest-risk parts of a patient's daily and long-term cycles of brain irritability overlap, seizures are nearly seven times more likely to occur than when the two cycles are mismatched.
Rao's team is now using this data to develop a new approach to forecasting patients' seizure risk, which could allow patients to avoid potentially dangerous activities such as swimming or driving when their seizure risk is highest, and to potentially take steps (such as additional medication doses) to reduce their seizure risk, similar to how people with asthma know to take extra care to bring their inhalers when pollen levels are high.
"I like to compare it to a weather forecast," Rao said. "In the past, the field has focused on predicting the exact moment a seizure will occur, which is like predicting when lightning will strike. That's pretty hard. It may be more useful to be able tell people there is a 5 percent chance of a thunderstorm this week, but a 90 percent chance next week. That kind of information lets you prepare."

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Questions or comments or would you like me to discuss something? I will try to answer, No medical diagnosis given or received. I am damned opinionated so don't expect fluff.

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Canoeing Moose

Just because my goal is to get back to canoeing and this moose is so ripped and cool looking. And he's even a solo paddler. But his right hand on the T-grip is wrong and the right arm should be extended.